I myself am increasingly of the opinion that while government, national and State (I’m a Californian) has a role, it has unfortunately carved out too big of a chunk and allocated itself too many roles, often on the most specious of arguments.
The idea of a legislature that meets infrequently, and where politician is a hat, not a job title, actually looks pretty ideal from where I’m standing. Why should I be disabused from this notion?
The only reason we have those nice modern things like phones and the internet is specialisation; it makes it possible for people to pursue things other than basic needs to survive. Sadly, that also means that people can pursue things that many people might find useless or repulsive, like being a professional liar as some 'full-time politicians' seem to be called by the various journalistic outlets. (let alone the opinionated internet - look, it's us!)
If we were to leave out the 'politician' and just say "person assigned by people who are busy doing other things, to govern those people that choose them". The politician part that would normally be in there would ideally only be scoped to the candidate phase of things and the interaction between different governing persons/positions to get stuff done. If you put it that way, it suddenly makes much more sense to have someone do a governing job full time as you'd want such a person to actually get stuff done.
It seems you'd be ok with a lot of administrators of the public good who do it as a job and a few politicians who do it on the side.
I now think elected politicians should be full time, full paid, professional service workers, with fully staffed offices.
Before, I was for term limits. Until I started lobbying on my pet issue. Watching the grizzled, wily bureaucrats run circles around the part-time amateur politicians was illuminating. Whereas the longer serving electeds had enough experience, knowledge to hold the bureaucrats accountable.
I know almost nothing about Texas, or its government. But its drive-by policy making concerns me. I'd rather have my elected representatives sitting on the levers of power, keenly aware of what's what.
First, the Texas government was designed, post-Reconstruction, to give as little authority as possible to the state government and to move government as close to the citizens as possible. That's all well and good. Had we stuck with that model, I would have few complaints, but we didn't. The Legislature has, over the intervening hundred years or so, routinely chipped away at the ability for cities and counties to run themselves as their citizens see fit. To pick on a popular thing to get riled up about, as soon as Austin and Dallas tried to regulate plastic bags and Uber-style taxi services, the Legislature fell all over itself to prohibit cities from enacting ordinances of such a type. When Denton wanted to regulate (but not prohibit) fracking, the Legislature yanked that, too.
I take the view that there must be some government and that, in a state with as varied of interests and as many moving parts as Texas has, a rural-style, infrequent central government with a weak executive (the Texas Governor has some of the most limited authority out of all 46 states and 4 commonwealths in the United States), and limited home-rule city authority is not a desirable state. Running such a large entity should be a full-time job, both for the executive and the legislative, because a government should be able to react to changing conditions and the needs of its citizens. That stands separate from the scope of authority that a government should or should not have. If the government is not even present most of the time, how does it serve the oversight and governance functions? And if we wish to have limited central government, why should cities not be able to do what their citizenry wants with limited exceptions? Why can Dallas voters not tax themselves for all of the light rail they want (DART can only exercise the tax authority granted it by the state)?
Another example of "we've always done it like this" is the sunset bill. Most Texas agencies sunset after a specified time, usually 10 years. There's always a scramble in the legislative session to reauthorize some minor agency like the Texas Department of Prisons or, my personal favorite, the Railroad Commission (which, despite its name, has not regulated railroads for generations; it is the oil and gas regulator for the state). Yet, somehow this mad dash to get the work done before the Legislature goes sine die is seen as a useful exercise.
I don't understand the thinking that makes the word "politician" a pejorative, nor that it should be something that someone does in his or her spare time. Running a system that directly impacts the lives of almost thirty million people should be the singular focus of the people we send to do it. Maybe not their entire lives, but for sure while they're in office.
I now have near religious reverence for the internet's notion of renewable leases.
I will try to explain my viewpoint succinctly, and note that it isn't exactly applicable to all States everywhere, but it is definitely applicable to the Federal Government.
I don't see politician as a pejorative per se, but I do think that politicians as professionals have strong incentives to find stuff to do so they can show their voters that they are out there doing stuff, whether or not stuff needs to be done. What's great about the three-branch system of government is that even if you have a non-persistent central legislative branch, you can, in theory, have an active and vigorous Executive, or alternatively and practicing the principle of subsidiarity (or just Federalization really), have responsibility over a given thing handled by the lowest level of government capable of dealing with it, to the extent that it needs to be handled by a government at all anyway. Either way, you at least get to have active courtrooms available.
Communities can live, and let other communities live. The extended order of Liberty.
When you have an active and vigorous Legislature, and an active and vigorous Executive, you have two branches of government actively looking for things to do, so they can say to their voters "Hey, I'm out here doing these things and if you like what I'm doing, vote for me the next time around too!"
I have been questioning whether that is actually beneficial for society these last few months though, and to be honest, I'm leaning towards "No." I think the platonic ideal of a well functioning government is that it's there for the things you need it for, and no more. It still has the gun to your head taking tax revenue, but it puts it to use defending the Nation from actual (not abstract) threats, putting people in prison for a shorter list of crimes than we have now, building the roads and railways communities have decided they should have, and keeping the lights on in the Courts. (This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, just give you an idea where my mind is at lately).
When you break it down, for those kinds of jobs, you need construction workers and people signing off on the contracts. You need Judges and their clerks and bailiffs and some form of prison guard in the jails. You need a tax authority which means you need accountants and a Treasurer. You might need an Army at least sometimes, and you almost certainly need an active Navy if you're on the Ocean, and all the soldiers and sailors and airmen and crews this entails. Nowhere in there, do I see a role for an active and vigorous legislature other than to set the budget, raise the taxes it needs to support the budget, and make some bureaucrats very uncomfortable or remove them entirely when they abuse the powers of their office.
That's why we have a Civil Service (and a Military Service, and a Diplomatic Service), and why the President has the power to call Congress into session at the drop of a hat to do something that the President and his entire Executive branch doesn't have the vested Constitutional authority or budget to do on his own. What else is a legislature to do all day other than debate the merits of various lobbyist proposals, and step on the toes of governments lower on the totem pole, and pass out handouts to important power brokers and constituencies in their home districts like candy? I don't think it is meant to be a glorious job, and maybe it's not even meant to be a full-time job the way the Taxman or the Soldier or the Diplomat is supposed to be a full-time job.
I guess the long and the short of it is, it's a matter of incentives. If you're a full-time legislator, you will look for (and find!) stuff to do, even if it isn't the best use of public funds, because this job is what pays your bills. If you're not a full-time legislator, you at least have to consider the impact that legislation has on your own life when the legislature isn't in session.
I will say, I wouldn't wish for the governance structure that Texas seems to have, nor would I wish to inflict California's on anyone else. I appreciate the lessons on Texas tonight, it's given me a lot to think about.
> Pragmatically, separating from the rest of the United States would be devastating to our economy. Much like the United Kingdom from the EU, but on a much larger scale, because the vast majority of our trade, people, and connectedness come from being part of the U.S.
If Texas seceeded from the United States, it could always do so as part of a customs union, or even single market, with the United States. That assumes the US of course that agreed to that (but it would be in the economic best interests of the US to agree). It would take away Texas' ability to run an independent trade policy, and Texas would basically have to accept various policies being dictated to it by the much more powerful and bigger US. But, there is nothing in principle impossible about such an arrangement. Indeed, the UK could end up with such an arrangement with the EU ("Norway plus customs union") – the latest Brexit deal doesn't have such an arrangement, but that is not because the EU is opposed, it is because the Johnson government is opposed. (If Corbyn was PM, it might actually happen.)
Likewise, freedom of movement of people and absence of border controls could be maintained if Texas and the US agreed. See the Schengen agreement, or the British-Irish Common Travel Area, for existing examples.
> Metro areas like Killeen and a good chunk of San Antonio would simply cease to exist if the military left.
If Texas seceeded from the US, it would need its own military. Given it has roughly 8% of US population, why could it not claim roughly 8% of the US military's assets and personnel? Obviously, the US would have to agree to that; but, it seems plausible to me that in a peaceful and legal secession, the US and Texas governments would sit down and negotiate a transfer of some US federal assets and personnel to Texas, including sections of the US military. Probably, any individual service member who had personal connections with Texas would be given the choice between transferring to Texas or remaining in the US. It wouldn't necessarily be exactly 8%, but it probably wouldn't be 0%. (Obviously certain capabilities, such as nuclear weapons, would be entirely excluded.)
> (Never mind that a lot of that oil that Texans are so proud of us dragging out of the ground has to go on pipelines that cross the U.S.)
International oil and gas pipelines are not unheard of.
To continue the analogy, the United Kingdom has "only" been a member of the EU and its predecessors for 47 years and it retained direct, non-delegated control over far more areas even after joining the EEC. Texas has been completely subservient to United States policy for four times as long and even if such a split were amicable, it would still be very messy.
The United States military has such a large presence in Texas because the United States Military is such a large organization, generally. There would be no reason for Texas to have such a comparatively large military, nor, I think, would an independent Texas be able to afford one. Killeen, for example, would probably still be an incorporated city but its population would be cut by two-thirds at best.
But the point of the thought exercise isn't to say whether or not it could happen; it's that Texans take an outsized view of whether it should happen and hold them/ourselves up on a false pedestal propped up by the idea of Texas being above/different/better-than the rest of the country when we're one of "the several States which may be included within this Union."
Texans already pay the federal taxes that purportedly fund the US military, though. I’m not sure if the US has more military assets in Texas than Texas itself can afford to pay for, but Texas is a big, rich state so I’d say there’s a chance that they’re effectively subsidizing some of the military bases in other states.
Texas could and likely would contribute military forces to various US-led coalition efforts at times.
https://taxfoundation.org/federal-taxes-paid-vs-federal-spen...
As our “very stable genius” of a President likes to point out, Germany and South Korea don’t exactly pay us back for stationing troops there either.
Unless the leaving party has a lot of somethings that the party they are leaving from wants, they don't really have much of a position to bargain.
Everyone seems to think that a (relatively) small unit of land and their people can 'take care of themselves', but unless you want to go back to just before the industrial revolution it really doesn't work that way. Almost everything everyone touches every day has some form of link to 'the outside world'.
Giving up interconnectivity really doesn't give anything back in return. (including self-regulation, unless you'd start living under a dome, or on the moon)
An independent Texas might find that an unequal deal with the US, in which the US gets to make all the major economic decisions and Texas just has to accept them, might actually put them in a better economic position than a more equal deal with greater trade barriers.
It isn't clear that Texas has that much of a say at the present anyway. For the last twenty to thirty years, it has been considered safe Republican territory, which given the nature of the US political system means it gets far less say than a swing state does. (That said, Texas used to be a swing state, and probably is going to become one again at some point, which will restore to it a lot of the political power it currently lacks.)
Absolutely not. The US has a huge military with a budget that exceeds the next top-8 or so military spender states in the world. And - almost all of its activity is foreign deployment for proto/pseudo-colonialism, occupations, pressuring other states with the threat of force etc. Texas wouldn't need any of that stuff. Now, obviously it would not be able to militarily defend itself from the US, so if it seceded at all its military would be mostly focused on Mexico, if at all. So - try 1% of asset and 2% of personnel maybe.
Why is that obvious? Nuclear weapons are state assets like anything else, and if you're going to follow your logic that a seceding state gets its part of the greater federal it should get some proportion of the nuclear weapons stockpile too.
The US is allied with at least three nuclear weapon states whose population is on the order of the population of Texas.
Besides, if you're going to setup a system where states can secede and seceding states have to hand over all their nukes you've created an absurd system where the last state to secede gets all the nukes.
I'm not a Texan but I do see the rationale behind freedom to associate or not associate with people based on shared values or a lack thereof.
I would expect there to be a free trade agreement at least as good as for Canada and Mexico.
Canada has similar population as Texas and does very well outside the US. I don't see why Texas couldn't do the same.
a) Pragmatically, separating from the rest of the United States would be devastating to our economy. Much like the United Kingdom from the EU, but on a much larger scale, because the vast majority of our trade, people, and connectedness come from being part of the U.S. Texans like to trot out the factoid that relatively little land in Texas is owned by the federal government because the feds didn't get any when Texas joined the Union, but the land that is owned by the feds contributes a massive amount to our economy. Metro areas like Killeen and a good chunk of San Antonio would simply cease to exist if the military left. (Never mind that a lot of that oil that Texans are so proud of us dragging out of the ground has to go on pipelines that cross the U.S.)
b) It promotes an "us vs. them" philosophy that's not healthy. Texas tries to hold itself out as separate and, to some extent, "above" the rest of the United States. Yet we get the same two Senators and elect representatives to the same federal House as everybody else. Our way of doing things is not necessarily the right way simply because it's the Texan way. (Our legislature, proudly to some people's way of thinking, only meets once every other year and only for a couple of months. That's a terrible way to govern a state of several million people, especially with a phenomenally weak executive.)
c) When do we move on from trying to live history to remembering it? In order to graduate from college, I had to take courses in both federal and state history (3 credit hours of "HIS 1024 History of Texas I" is on my transcript), just because we're so wrapped up in our own mythology. Yes, Texas was its own country. So was California, and Alaska, and Hawaii. Those are things for the textbooks and to explain weird language on deeds and why so many flags fly over the state capitol. It's not the basis for some inexplicable "independent" streak.
Texas needs to get off its predisposition with its past and look towards its future, preferably being one that doesn't embrace fossil fuels--good job on the wind production, thanks T. Boone Pickens--and a car-focused, sprawling development culture.
I hope it does, though I'm watching from afar, having decamped to Washington State many years ago.